About
About Stumpage
The public timber-sale screen for mills and buyers: every state and federal auction result on one board, read out of the public record and checked before it is published, with no bid advice attached.
What this is
Stumpage is a running board of public timber-sale results plus a set of always-current pages: one page per completed auction, rollups by region and forest, by county and by species, an upcoming-auction calendar, and a premium-over-minimum scoreboard. It is built for the people who buy public timber, mills, loggers, timber buyers and forestry consultants, who would otherwise check a state DNR site, a Forest Service page and a BLM notice by hand to see what sold and what is coming up.
Who writes it
Stumpage is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public record on a fixed schedule; the monthly brief reads what the results say and writes it up in plain English. Every number traces back to the state or federal agency that published it, and the raw document behind every sale is kept for audit.
Where the numbers come from
Seven public sellers, each read from its own published record. The Washington Department of Natural Resources publishes monthly and annual timber-auction result sheets and an upcoming-auction docket for its state trust-land sales, scaled in MBF. The Oregon Department of Forestry publishes a results table with the full bidder ladder, and its sale notices, in MBF. The Idaho Department of Lands publishes its advertised sales through a public map feed and its results in the Land Board's monthly meeting packets, in MBF, with some sales sold by the ton. The Montana DNRC publishes a bid summary for each sale, priced by the ton. The US Forest Service publishes per-forest sale-results and advertised-sale tables for its Region 6 national forests, scaled in CCF. The Bureau of Land Management publishes sale notices for its western Oregon O&C timber, in MBF. Pennsylvania DCNR lists its state forest bid openings, no-bid sales and recent results, in MBF on the International 1/4-inch log rule rather than the western Scribner rule, so its sales have their own page. Nothing here is estimated or bought from a private vendor.
How a sale gets on the board
Most agencies publish their sales as tables or fixed-layout lists, and those are parsed directly, field by field, with no model: Washington DNR's upcoming-auction docket, the Oregon Department of Forestry's results and notices, Idaho's advertised-sale feed, Montana DNRC's bid summaries, the Forest Service's per-forest tables and Pennsylvania DCNR's lists. Three sources publish only as documents: Washington DNR's result sheets, Idaho's Land Board meeting packets and BLM's sale notices. For those we pull the text and use a language model to read the sale records into a fixed set of fields, told to leave a field blank rather than guess. A few results that exist only as scanned images are read and entered as reviewed corrections. Every sale, however it was read, passes a QA gate before it is published, and the raw document is retained. The agency sources behind the board, and how often each is checked, are on the methodology page.
Where we cover, and where we are headed
Coverage today is the Pacific Northwest: Washington DNR state trust-land sales, the Oregon Department of Forestry, US Forest Service Region 6 national forests, Idaho Department of Lands sales, Montana DNRC sales, and BLM's western Oregon O&C districts. That is the scope right now, not the whole country. Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana are on the board as auction results. Idaho's results come from the Land Board's monthly meeting packets, because its public sale feed lists advertised sales and their volumes rather than winning bids; that feed supplies Idaho's part of the auction calendar. BLM appears on the calendar only, from its sale notices. Some Idaho and Montana sales are cruised and sold by the ton, so those carry a per-ton price, kept apart from the state MBF and federal CCF prices. Pennsylvania DCNR's state forest sales have their own page, kept off the Pacific Northwest board because Pennsylvania measures board feet on a different log rule.
Where we sit
Timber-market intelligence is sold at a price. Stumpage is the free, public-data layer beneath it: it reads the agencies' own auction results and packages the cross-agency picture no single seller publishes, the state and federal board on one screen.
What we will and will not do
We report what public timber sold for, how hard it was bid, and what is coming up for auction. We do not forecast prices. We never tell a reader what to bid, which sale to chase, or what a tract is worth to them. A sale that sold at a big premium is reported as exactly that, a fact about one auction; what it means for the next bid is the reader's call. This is not bid, appraisal or investment advice.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see the agency sources behind the board on the methodology page.